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This Week In Google 234 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's
time for TWIG 'This week in Google' and the big story just broke as we go to
press, as they say: Lenovo buys Motorola Mobility from Google! Is it a huge
gain for Motorola? Huge loss for Google? Our analysts
explain right after this.

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This is
Twit, 'This week in Google', episode 234. Recorded January, 29, 2014

A Six Pack
of Rolexes

Leo: This week
in Google is brought to you by Personal Capital. With Personal Capital, you
finally have your entire financial life in one place. And get a clear view of
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website or online portfolio. For a free two week trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and use the offer code TWIG1. It's time for TWIG, 'This week in Google'. The show that covers the Google+, the Cloud, Facebook, the Twitter.Gina Trapani is here from ThinkUp.com. Hi,
Gina.

Gina Trapani: Hello.
Good to be here.

Leo: Watch her
carefully because the sun will set in New York City. She will darken.

Leo: Oh! I love
it! That's Jeff Jarvis. He is out Journalism expert. Professor
of Journalism at City University of New York.Google
expert too.What Would
Google Do?And of
course his latest is Public Parts and Gutenberg the Geek.

Jeff: Which
today, this is how students could get it, is free.

Leo: What!

Jeff: If you go,
you can get it today for free. The Kindle single version, not
the audible version.

Leo: Right. Go
to Amazon.com and type in 'Gutenberg'...

Jeff: The Geek.

Leo: The
Geek.

Jeff: I never
require my students to buy my books. So...

Leo: That's
nice. That's kind of you. So you know on Sunday, we had 'why gluten-free at
zero', now Gutenberg the Geek at zero, you choose! Also with us Kevin Marks,
The expert on open standards. The guy who worked very
hard first at the BBC, then was hired by Apple to work on QuickTime, worked at
Google, British Telecom, Salesforce.com. He has been everywhere. Nice to have
you, Kevin!

Kevin Marks: Nice to be
back.

Leo: Just before
the show began, big news broke. Kind of a shocker even! According to, at first
China Daily then Reuters, the New York Times chimed in, as did TechCrunch.
Google is in talks to sell the Motorola Mobility division, the Moto X, the Moto
G phones to Lenovo, a Chinese company. Google paid more than $12 billion for
Motorola about a year ago and now reportedly selling it for $3 billion.
Although, what's not clear is how much of the patent portfolio goes along with
Motorola Mobility. China daily says, 10,000 patents.
But it strikes me that that might be something Google will keep a hold of.
Although, the patents haven’t been as useful; oh, we don't know how useful.
They might have been a deterrent. They haven't used the patents to sue
anybody.

Jeff: Was there
ever an evaluation put on the patents or put on the business of Motorola separately?

Leo: No. And
there were a lot of articles saying, 'why did Google buy Motorola?', and the
consensus seemed to be: patents. Although, I thought, it was a great deal to
get into the hand-set business and do something; a pure Google hand set. They didn't
really do that. They kept the Nexus line. They didn't want to give Motorola too
much of an advantage, and because they didn't want to lose Samsung, HTC, LG and
all the others. So, Motorola was just yet another hand set maker. They didn't
have much of an advantage by being partnered with Google. Except for that big
marketing budget for the Moto X; it saw a lot of ads. But, while we don't know
for sure, it seems they were losing a considerable amount of money on the Moto
X and the Moto G. In fact, I just bought a new Moto X, an updated Moto X for
$100 off. They offered a deal on Monday for one hour. I know, what's the point,
right? But they have been doing a lot of those. I think that's coming
back.

Jeff: What did
you pay for it then?

Leo: So, an unlocked
Moto X, 32 Gigs of RAM, wooden back, because that's what I really wanted. It's
the main reason I bought it: $350 bucks. That's a good price for an unlocked
phone.

Jeff: Very good
price.

Leo: It's not a
Google experience. But to me, it's more than close enough, it's better in some respects.

Leo: So, here's
the interesting thing, and this is the back story to this. Lenovo already makes
phones. They make quite good Android phones. There were rumors they might make,
considering they are a Windows OEM, they might make Windows phones. But, they
haven't to date. And they have not started selling Lenovo phones in the US, although,
they said they were thinking about it. While I don’t know how much sense this
makes for Google, it makes a lot of sense for Lenovo. It's a way for them to
quickly get into the US market. I don't know how popular the Motorola phone is,
but it's certainly a great US brand and it is made in the US of A. So, I think
for...

Jeff: So, what
makes sense to me too is that I don't think...Google gets the value it needs
out of Play editions, which by the way is another
story that they may change the name of Nexus. The Play and Nexus editions, so
they get the value out of that, they can make these things. And they were never
really meant to be a large consumer hardware manufacturer, I don't think. I
think it's a scope out of their sphere.

Leo: Yet, they
just acquired Nest. It's looked like Google has been building a portfolio of
consumer devices and certainly they are pushing hard on...

Jeff: Here is
another theory. Did it piss of the other phone manufacturers...

Leo: Maybe,
maybe.

Jeff: And there's
another story on the run down today that says that, Google reached an agreement
allegedly with Samsung. In which, Samsung is going to get rid of some of its
ridiculous apps and get closer to a purer experience. It's on the run down. So,
maybe Samsung is wiggling its own way out and Google says 'okay, okay, we are
out of the phone business now, so stay friends.' I don't know.

Leo: It's a
disappointment to me, I have to say. This has been my daily driver since the
Moto X came out and as I said I just bought another one, I like it so much. And...

Jeff: Would you
have bought it today knowing this news?

Leo: Probably
not. I would certainly want to wait and see. I don't know what Lenovo is going
to do. But I like how closely tied to Google they were and I'm feeling like that's
too bad. But I guess you might be right Jeff. They needed to do this to
assuage...

Jeff: I never
heard tension. I never heard complaints or saw any evidence of that. There was
some speculation there might be. None of that seem to rise up. So, it is rank
speculation on my part. Rank.

Gina: It's a head
scratcher otherwise. I don't know. I thought the Moto X and the Moto G are like
their first phones and will get better. And I had kind of the same hopes as Leo
had, that they'll become a phone manufacturer, that they'll own Motorola more ,
than be like 'they are operating under their name and they are a separate
business' and constantly kind of making them a separate thing. But I thought
Moto X is a great device. Leo, did you say you wouldn't have bought the Moto X
if Motorola had been owned by Lenovo?

Leo: It's the
same phone obviously so I like it. But part of the reason I like it is because
it's a Google phone and one presumes it'll get the updates faster. It got KitKat within two weeks of the release of KitKat. It presumably will get 442 imminently. And the
other thing is of course, I worry about Lenovo. Now, to their credit, when
Lenovo bought IBM's ThinkPad division, they did a great job with it. And kept
that wanted brand in the forefront and it continues to make excellent ThinkPads and other Windows laptops. So, in that respect,
they are good. By the way, they are partially owned by the Chinese government,
I believe.

Jeff: That's the
part that makes me nervous. Though, hell of an American weird thing to say...

Leo: Yeah, but
who cares. Somebody is going to spy.

Jeff: What was
the joke? Would you rather have an American server in China or a Chinese server
in America?

Leo: At this
point, you just got to assume everybody knows what you do on your phone and
leave it at that. If there is an announcement, Lenovo does say they will be
making a big announcement about a major acquisition Thursday morning in
Beijing, which is pretty soon I think. This is a big move for Lenovo. $3
billion is a good deal too, I have to say. Given how much Google paid: $12.5
billion. Lenovo has said, the company's tablets and smart phones will be
entering the US and western European markets by 2015. Well guess what. Maybe not, maybe sooner.Although, now
this would have to be approved right? And who knows? I mean, I don't
know what the approval would look like. Will they continue to make phones in
the US? Will they continue to make the Moto X and Moto G? I don't know. Will
they lard them with crap wear like the other phones are? That would be a great
disappointment to me.

Jeff: It's almost
6 AM in Beijing.

Leo: Yeah, so it
should be soon. We are all thinking. Apparently, according to Tim Stevens at
CNET, Lenovo was taking an active interest in blackberry but the Canadian
government said no, remember that? Canadian government said Blackberry has to
be, majority ownership has to stay in Canada.

Jeff: Is there
any chance that the US government blocks this?

Leo: I think
there's a huge chance.

Jeff: On what
basis by the way.

Leo: 'We don't
like China.' I don't know. Yeah technology transfer would be a good
start.

Jeff: Was there a
discussion of that possibility when IBM sold? I think it was, wasn't it?

Leo: That's a
good question, I don't know.

Jeff: Well, this
one has left us stumped.

Leo: It is
probably one of the most unexpected things I can imagine. They just bought
Motorola for a huge amount of money. It was 2011, it's been over a year . But it just seems like a
quick capitulation.

Jeff: Google's
stock is down 1.3% or 1.4%, but then so is all tech.

Leo: Right.

Jeff: Except
Microsoft, which is up 1%.

Leo: Right.

Kevin: The market
is tanking. Blame Apple. If Lenovo is going to buy Motorola, the big deal for
Motorola is that they have US manufacturing. Maybe that Lenovo is looking to
have to acquire a US manufacturing base so that, when there are
coming trade...

Leo:Ahhh!

Kevin: That's one possibility. And I suspect any
deal they have to do with the government would involve like, not shutting down
factories. Because that's the point where governments get interested isn't it?

Leo: Right.

Jeff: Well
various pieces of the phone will still come from China and still have back
doors installed in them, so...

Leo: We just
want to keep the jobs in the US. We don't care about spying.

Kevin: You can
install back doors in anything now. The story that got me recently was that SD
cards, very easy to back door. Because SD cards have stopped being raw storage,
a few years ago and they all run little micro controllers because the storage
is so small now, it's crappy. So it has to have an OS running a file system on
there to sort of hide the defects in it. And though these are all like strange,
close source or semi open source micro controllers, therefore you can take them
over more easily because they never get patched. So, SD cards are a new...

Leo: Great! that's nice.

Kevin: You put a
SD card in your phone and suddenly it's sitting there running software and
looking at every image we take and who are we calling in time of the day and
things.

Leo: That's why
I've given up. Take my stuff, please. Anyway that was the big breaking news as
we sat down at the table today. Hello everybody. Good to see you. Welcome. By
the way, maybe they are going to use the money to defray the expense for the
big deep mind purchase.

Jeff: Deep mind,
$500 million?

Leo: Half a
billion. SO, tell me about that. What does that mean? Who is deep mind? It's
artificial intelligence?

Kevin: It's artificial
intelligence but it's self-training networks. So training neural networks and
noisy data was the coverage I read about describing what they were doing. So if
you remember the project where they wired up a neural network and fed it Youtube and it found cat faces.

Jeff: Oh right.
That was them?

Kevin: That wasn't
them but that's the technology. It's that same kind of idea but apparently
these guys have been good at training; getting your networks to train when you
haven't got a tight feedback loop. A classic neural network is, you show it a
thing and tell it what the output should be, and you train it to give that. So
you use it for OCR and things like that. Optical character
recognitions. So you show it a picture of a number 6 and then you tell
it the output should be number 6 and you show picture number 7 and do that over
and over again and eventually it builds something that is a little bit like a
human brain. One of the things that this group has done, they've taught neural
networks to play retro attire video games by showing them the screen and giving
them the four up, down , left and right and fire buttons. And not giving them
any rules or in the sense, in the game just giving them feedback that is
points. So, they've actually got things that can now play break up better than
humans.

Leo: Of course!

Jeff: What's
fascinating too is that part of the deal, part of what
sold Google on the deal, according to one report is their creating ethics
committee.

Kevin: No, there
was no around it. They said it's a condition of the deal. They wanted it.

Jeff: that's what
I'm saying. That it was a condition of the deal.

Leo: Right.
Because everybody fears Google as Skynet and they
don't want Google to get intelligence etc. etc. So, the question is, is this to
improve search or is this part of the robotics research
that Andy Rubin in leading?

Jeff: Yes, this
is for search.

Leo: Remember
that they hired Ray Kurzweil who is one of the
premier artificial intelligence experts of some time ago.

Kevin: Yes, he
still is. Well his early work was OCR as well. He bought machines that would
read text for the blind. That was his. As well as synthesis
and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. But the other thing is
that, arguably they are trying to build a different bit of the brain. Kurzweil
wants to build a cerebellum like the memory and resolving part of the brain.
Not memory, sort of the layered reasoning part of the brain and these guys seem
to be trying to build the hippocampus which is the sort of learning and memory
part of the brain.

Jeff: Only Kevin
Marks would do the anatomical analysis...

Leo: The problem
is nobody is building a frontal lobe.

Kevin: That's the
question. You have got to build the frontal lobe but also the bit that no one
is building is also the emotional response feedback. No one is building an Amygdala.

Leo: Yeah,
because otherwise, you got a robot that's smart and has no conscience. And
apparently no impulse control. So, you're really screwed.

Gina: They should
write like movies and stories about this plot.

Leo: Yeah. Seems like it would be a fritillary at a plum.

Gina: Seems like
it.

Kevin: So, I had
oral surgery yesterday. I spent the day sitting in front of the TV watching
movies holding an eye specs to my face. So, I re-watched 2001, so I am up to
date on this.

Leo: So, you are
ready. Kurzweil gave an interview to the Sunday Times last month. In which he
said that, by 2029 they would have created a machine that understands language
and human emotion. Understand it doesn't have it. And well before that by 2018,
just a few years from now, the Google brain, he's apparently called it the
Google brain, will have revolutionized searches we know of. This is the quote,
"Right now search is based mostly on looking for key words, what I'm
working on is creating a search engine that understands the meaning of those
billions of documents. It will be more like a human assistant, you could talk
things over with; that you can express complicated, even personal concerns
to. Your always on cybernetic friend! I want this! I
don't care if it takes over or starts bitching about all the dials up and down
its left side. I want it! Okay so they got the part where you talk to your
computer, it's now in all versions of Chrome. Okay Google, room comes alive.

Kevin: Don't say
that. All my phones...

Leo: I know!
This we have pinpointed the problem by the way. Because I was playing with it
the other day and people were saying, 'God dammit, you keep waking up my
Motorola X or my Xbox One. Stop it'. All the machines are listening now. I like
the idea of it. It is very primitive right now. But you can have a little bit
of a conversation. God I love it if it would just let me talk. Just let me
talk. You listen.

Jeff: All we do
in life is just talk.

Kevin: I think
this is a conceptual flaw. I know they are all excited about building a Star
Trek computer, but the reason the Star Trek computer worked like that was
because that way they could actually use it as part of the plot and have them
talk to it and have it talk back. In actually, it is not very practical to talk
to the computer, when you are in a bridge full of 20 people doing their jobs.
And it is not practical to talk to the computer when you are in a office full of 20 people doing
their jobs or on a bus, in a cafe or any of the other places where we use
computers all the time. So, for me this is...I don't talk to it. The only time
I talk to the computer is when you guys are on the other end of it and I'm
doing a podcast.

Leo: Don't get
misled though. Don't get misled by that. I mean, you could type your query or
whatever. The fact that it would be able to better understand your queries,
know what you are thinking of instead of actually what you're saying. Thing
like that would be useful.

Jeff: Hold on,
hold on. When you live in cubical land, most people are on the phone or used to
be.

Kevin: I hate
it.

Leo: Kevin is
out of work right now.

Kevin: You see you
are trying to write code, you really don't want somebody next to you on the
phone. This is a problem. They actually did some research on this and they
found that people are much more productive when they've got private offices. If
they are actually trying to do something that involves thinking and not be
interrupted, and having people talking...What happens is, if you look at these
open plan offices, everyone has bigger and bigger, more acoustic head phones
on.

Gina: It's true.

Kevin: And, that
background noise. If you go to somewhere where they have these giant open
offices, half the people there have got headphones on and they talk down like
that try to hide away from each other.

Jeff: Kevin, my
friend, that's not the normal world.

Leo: I think
that is the normal world. In fact, have you seen the ads for Beats headphones?
They were running during all the football games. And what they were selling was
that these headphones, would let you tune out the
noise. There was one with Colin Kaepernick and
then I guess in response, they made one for Richard Sherman, let me show you.
This is the beats ad.

Ad playing. Reporter in
ad: The atmosphere was electric. What's it like playing in front of
these fans?

Richard
Sherman in ad: It's incredible man. I think we have the most outstanding fans
in the world.

Reporter in
ad: How important is home field advantage?

Leo: That's
what's on his head of course. Beats headphones.

Reporter in
ad: Do you think trash talk is a distraction to your teammates?

Richard
Sherman in ad: It doesn't distract anybody. It motivates.

Leo: This is
actually a great timely ad.

Richard
Sherman in ad: Well, you try to set an example. You try to be an
example.

Reporter in
ad: How do you cut out, let’s say, when your secondary plays dirty?

Richard
Sherman in the ad: Well I'll take exception to that.

Leo: Poor guy.
This is why headphones were invented.

Reporter in
ad: Did you fight a lot as a kid?

Richard
Sherman in the ad: Not everybody in Compton is a gang member.

Reporter in
ad: Richard, have you gone downhill since college?

Richard
Sherman in the ad: No.

Reporter in
ad: As an athlete do you feel you are untouchable?

Richard
Sherman in the ad: I'm not afraid of anything.

Reporter in
ad: What about your reputation as a thug?

Richard
Sherman in the ad: I don't have that reputation.

Reporter in
ad: Richard, do you think you are above the law?

Leo: Time to put
on the headphones Richard. Put on the headphones. Peace and quiet. Hear what you want is the new slogan for Beats. I think that's a direct
response because how many of us really are in a locker room peppered by
questions from the sports reporting press. But, many of us are in offices where
people are annoying. This is why people wear headphones.

Kevin: I don't
wear Beats. But, I do have Sennheiser 280's.

Leo: I love my
headphones.

Kevin: 35 dB's of
noise reduction.

Jeff: These Beats
are amazing. The studios are amazing. They are comfortable.

Leo: Really, you
like them? Because I always thought they were kind of overpriced.

Jeff: They are. They
are.

Kevin:Sennheiser 280's: 90 bucks.

Jeff: What
happened was that I could only exchange. The only thing I could find in the
store was that. So. I used it as an excuse to get it
and I'm happy with them now though.

Leo: Yeah. Well,
they sound good. Hey comfortable headphones that sound good are really a life
saver. I agree.

Jeff: Don't you
know. That's your life.

Leo: If I get on
an airplane without my headphones, I go ' Oh! no,
please'. I mean it's the worst, worst thing that could happen. That baby behind
me, the kid in front of me with his phone and I just want to seal the world
out.

Jeff: What's
right now in New York is that they double as ear muffs if you need them badly
because it's cold.

Leo: Right,
Gina?

Gina: Yes. It's
cold.

Leo: It's not
too late to come back to California Gina.

Gina: My real
estate lawyer might disagree.

Leo: Have you
moved in yet?

Gina: Not yet.
Our closing is next week.

Leo: Good
luck.

Gina: Yeah, thank
you. Thank you. These are expensive headphones. They look good though. I'm
still a newbie to the whole open office thing. I've got crappy ear buds and
they just don't do it.

Leo: Okay. Beats
Studio. The recommendation form Jeff. I'll tell you
what I wear and like...

Kevin:Sennheiser 280's, that's the one.

Leo: Yeah those
are nice. How much are those? 90 bucks? That's not
bad. They look comfortable.

Kevin: Yeah they
are good. Sennheiser make studio headphones. You can
pay three grand for Sennheiser headphones if you want
real studio ones. But these are actually recordist's headphones. So they've got 35 dB of passive noise
cancelling. Which means you put them on and you are already
wearing ear protectors.

Leo: I like my
classic...

Kevin: And they
sound good.

Leo: I like my
classic Cannes the AKG K240 studio headphones.

Kevin: Those are
good too. But they don't cut out as much sound.

Leo: No, they're
actually a good choice for people who want to hear a little bit because they
are ported. But if you really want to seal it out then there is also these Sennheiser H 280's. And they seal your head like you've got
a clamp on it.

Kevin: They are
the ones. Those are my favorite headphones.

Leo: Yeah. We
are kind of headphones buffs here. I think we've got all kinds. There are the
K240's on Jeff. Most of us tend to wear those because they are comfortable, you
can wear them all day. And they don't really seal out the noise. What are
these? These are Audio Technica's? ATH-M50's. Both Alex and John who are audio files like these. They are comfy enough.
There's nothing comfier than a K240.

Kevin: The
fascinating thing for me is that, like 5 years ago, headphones like that were
something only professionals wore, and now they're being advertised in Super
Bowl by the star athletes. Because, suddenly over the year,
it's fashion. I think it's this sense of shared space. The tag line of
that thing is right. You listen to what you want to hear and you want to be; as
Gina says you are in this open plan office , there's a
lot going on and you wantot pull yourself away from it. And it was the original, certainly Walkman idea of
this...'you have your own soundtrack to the world'.

Leo: It's kind
of interesting that it's back, isn't it?

Kevin: The other
encouraging thing for me is, these things actually
have got acoustic quality. So, you can...there's been this sort of myth of
mp3's just drawing audio quality in the music industry and actually what's
happened is that people have been mixing balancing things badly and then
mp3-ing them. If one is only listening through crappy little ear buds anyway,
we go to make sure this stuff works. Whereas, that's
apparently not true anymore. Gigantic headphones with audio isolation
are mainstream. There are four aisles of them in the
electronic store compared to like one aisle of TV's now. And, everyone's
walking around wearing this. So, that means that we can go back to good quality
audio again and stop mixing everything so that it's compressed for somebody who
has got these on and walking in traffic.

Leo: So, you’re
absolutely right. It has to start with fashion, Kids
can't wear them unless it's okay to wear them. You don't want to be the dork
who’s wearing headphones. And I saw that with my son, Henry who started wearing
lime green headphones about 3-4 years ago. It was clearly had become the
fashion. And that's because these ear buds are so crappy. Not only sound bad,
but they fall out. They are crappy. That's what everybody had with their iPod.
But I also think, it came from the commerce side,
because people realized 'oh you know, you can build these really cheap and sell
them for a huge premium if you just attach Dr. Dre's name to it'.

Kevin: The mark up
on the Beats and the follow on is amazing yeah.

Leo: So, it's a
very very profitable business as well. And, that's
why when you go to CES you'll see aisle after aisle after aisle of
headphones.

Jeff: There was a
great story in the New York Times, I think about a year and half ago about the
origin of Beats and the company that originally made them and how Dre and Co. got them out of it and it's been a phenomenal
business story.

Gina: See now the Wirecutter, Bose...

Leo:WIrecutter is almost always right in this case, completely
wrong.

Jeff: Yeah, I've
tried them, I don’t like them.

Leo: No, I love Wirecutter that's Brian Lam and Co. and they do a great job
and 99% of the time, I completely agree because the goal of this is pick one
and that's the one. And almost always they are right and I agree with their TV
reviews. But in that case I cannot, those are not flat headphones and accurate
headphones. They are highly overpriced, but Bose is the king of mark up on this
particular. You know where you go, is head room which is headphone.com. They
sell all the brands. They've been doing that for years and they have a huge
variety. Bu they also have a lot of helpful information so you can pick the
headphone that makes sense for you. Because it is personal. And really, ideally you would go and listen before you buy because they all
have some unique...

Jeff: In the chat
room there's a Press release now, thank you who said it...

Leo: "With
a strong PC business and a fast-growing smartphone business, this agreement
will significantly strengthen Lenovo€™s position in the smartphone market. They
will gain a strong market presence in North America and Latin America,
both of which of course are Moto X places as well as a foothold in Western
Europe, where Moto X has just recently entered the market." $2.91
billion dollars, including $1.41 billion paid at close, $660 million in cash, $750 million in Lenovo shares. That's interesting, that
means Lenovo...Google now has a stake in Lenovo, which I find interesting.
Lenovo...

Jeff: "Google will maintain the ownership of the vast majority of the Motorola
Mobility patent portfolio, including current patent applications and invention
disclosures. As part of it's ongoing relationship with Google, Lenovo will receive a license to this rich
portfolio of patents and other IP. Additionally Lenovo will receive over 2,000
patent assets, as well as the Motorola Mobility brand and trademark
portfolio."

Leo: Very
interesting. Of course, subject to regulatory approval.

Kevin: So, that
means the market...what 9 billion of this? They can basically take a $9 billion
write down and take a lot of their profits as well.

Gina: So they
paid $9 billion for patents.

Jeff: That was
about the guess of what it was worth.

Leo: Yeah. And
of course, there's more to it than this. Who knows what the agreements include.
But they've may have acquired a very strong partner in Android as well. Maybe.they said to Lenovo, 'okay,
but you got to keep these Google experience', we don't know.

Jeff: And, not
make any more Windows phones.

Leo: Yeah. They
might have kept them out of the Windows market. Not that that matter that much.
It also means that you could for instance, say that from now on the Nexus line is made by Lenovo.

Jeff: Now, that's
the other story that’s up is that they are getting rid of the Nexus line.

Leo: Is this merely a re-naming to Google experience?

Jeff: That's what
is perplexing as that's what it says. They renamed it. I don't know what that
means.

Leo: Does that
mean...I mean, Nexus has traditionally met a
pure Google experience.

Jeff: That
apparently becomes Play...

Leo: What's the
distinction though between an HTC Google experience, a Samsung Galaxy 4 Google
experience and a Nexus 5? Is there a distinction?

Jeff: Yes. If
they get rid of that, then you have Play editions of other brands phones, but
you have no Google brand phone.

Leo: Got
it.

Jeff: If this is
true, Google got out of having branded devices.

Gina: They are
not re-branding right, the Google Play editions that already exist right, like
I'm holding one here?

Leo: They are
dropping Nexus.

Gina: They are
just dropping Nexus. Yeah. It's superseding that Google Play edition.

Jeff: That
depresses me far more.

Gina: Yeah, me
too.

Kevin: Well, they
have a bigger problem in that the next Nexus will be the Nexus 6 and that's
actually....

Leo: They had to
stop. I got another interesting theory...

Kevin: They've
seen how that one ends, it's like Oh God, what.

Leo: What is
Google most afraid of right now? Samsung.Because Samsung is creating an Android device that is divergent
from Google in an extreme way. Now you were saying they there may be
some sort of agreement now between Google and Samsung?

Jeff: It's on the
run down. Yeah, I put it under Android.

Gina: There's
also an agreement for Samsung and Google to collaborate on patents. Existing
patents and like patents for the next 10 years.

Jeff: It's fourth
one under Android...

Leo: They are
very united in their fight. Remember, Google just recently dropped the lawsuit.
Motorola just dropped a Samsung lawsuits right? So, they are really united
against Microsoft and Apple. These are the natural. So re/code has the story.
"After Google pressure, Samsung will dial back Android tweaks and home
grown apps" It's not just Google pressure, I think consumers are doing the
same thing. In fact...

Kevin: The thing
Samsung is realizing is that they are losing sales to the Nexus 5, partly n
price or partly on the fact that their apps aren't that good. As somebody
pointed out, if they are built in and around delete-able, it's sort of a dead
way on the phone. My wife has the Galaxy 4, I had my Nexus 5 stolen and when I
went to replace it, it was like no, I'm good. Another Nexus 5
definitely. I wouldn't think of buying the Samsung one because of the
weight of those apps and the way it makes...They're apps aren't bad, they're
just not quite as up to date as the Google one.

Leo: Yeah no they're
bad. They're bad. They're just bad.

Kevin: The camera
app and the slow motion stuff and the things they do in there are fairly good.
But, I've been impressed by the Nexus 5 for that too. But they’re not as good
as the cloud services and stuff as Google is because nobody is, so that's that.

Leo: You take
this Moto X Lenovo, I'm going to tell you what to do.
You take the Moto X, you give it a 1080p screen. I
don't think you have to make it bigger, I think the size is fine and you put a
really damn good camera in it. 8 megapixel, maybe 13 megapixel, let's go for
it. Let's make a 20 megapixel damn good camera in here and this is a great
phone. So, I'm hopeful. I think Google looked for a partner that could take
Motorola where Google has been unable to take it. A manufacturing partner,
a partner that can make a much better bit of hardware because Google’s biggest
fear is the 18% market share Samsung has in Android and they crapping it up. And, I think it is very deleterious to Android in general. So, it makes
sense that they would both pursue this by saying, 'Samsung, you got to knock it
off.' Samsung is also hearing from
consumers I'm sure. And selling this to Lenovo and saying,
'Here guys, you got to make a beautiful Google experience phone, to kick
Samsung to the curb.'

Jeff: But you
know what, it's going to be an expensive phone. Google used this opportunity to
try to drop the prices down and pressure the entire industry on cost and now
that's gone. And, that's why with the Nexus being gone depresses me so much. Because they only way they did it on Motorola was because they
owned it. And they had a business reason to do that. They want to expand
Android. Nexus, they want to do, to show an experience of a great phone at a
low price. Now, Google doesn't have that...

Leo: Here's the
statement. Larry Page has just made a statement, "We’ve signed an
agreement to sell Motorola to Lenovo. This is an important move for Android
users everywhere; I wanted to explain why in detail. We acquired Motorola in
2012 to help supercharge the
Android ecosystem by creating a stronger
patent portfolio for Google and great smartphones for our users. Over the past
19 months, Dennis Woodside and the team have done a tremendous job reinventing
the company. They've focused on building a smaller number of great and great
value smartphones. Both the Moto G and the Moto X are doing really well, and
I’m very excited about the smartphone lineup for 2014. And on the intellectual
property side, Motorola’s patents have helped create a level playing field,
which is good news for all Android’s users and partners." So, he’s
declared victory, but he says, "The smartphone market is super
competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile
devices. It’s why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo,
which has a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest and
fastest-growing PC manufacturer in the world." This is good for Lenovo, I
have to say. "This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving
innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users
everywhere." In other words, 'this will help us not piss off the other OEM's.'
"As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other
hardware efforts", to your point Jeff. "The dynamics and maturity of
the wearable and home markets", Glass and Nest.

Gina: Glass and
Nest yeah.

Leo: "For
example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. We’re excited by
the opportunities to build amazing new products for users within these emerging
ecosystems." In other words, 'we are not getting out of hardware, we are
not getting out of consumer, we just don't have the
resources to devote to phone.'

Leo: "Lenovo has the expertise and track record to scale Motorola into a major
player within the Android ecosystem." This is I think directly in response
to Samsung's dominance. "They have a lot of experience in hardware, and
they have global reach. In addition, Lenovo intends to keep Motorola’s distinct
brand identity, just as they did when they acquired ThinkPad from IBM in
2005." They did a very good job with that. "Google will retain the
vast majority of Motorola’s patents, which we will continue to use to defend
the entire Android ecosystem. The deal has yet to be approved in the U.S.
or China, and this usually takes time. So until then, it’s business as usual.
I’m phenomenally impressed with everything the Motorola team has achieved and
confident that with Lenovo as a partner, Motorola will build more and more
great products for people everywhere."- Larry Page. So, that is...he
addressed directly some of the obvious concerns.

Kevin: They may
even actually be able to stop sending all their money through Ireland
now.

Leo: Send it
through China. Wow. Huge story. Jason Howell is
watching with interest because it's all about Android last night. But this
changes the landscape for next episode. The next day, they did it just for
us.

Gina: It does
tell with the news and the rumors about the discontinuation of the Nexus line.
Obviously, Google doesn't want to be in the business of making phones or
tablets. Very clear right. They want to be in the
early, they want to be in wearable's and home because
it's not a competitive mature market yet, but phones is. They don't want to...

Leo: Do you
think, this was the plan all along?

Gina: I don't
think so.

Kevin: I wouldn't
think so. I think that they are more in improvisational mode. I think they'll
say 'yes we'll buy this and keep it for three years and sell it to somebody
else.'

Jeff: No, I
think, 'what they hell, let's buy it , let's get the patents, we could turn
around right away and sell it, but no let’s use a period of time to demonstrate
to the industry, what phones can be. Moto X is that. Okay good bye.' I think
you are right in questioning it.

Leo: I tell you,
what it does say to me is that Larry Page is a hell of a chess player. Whether
he has planned this or improvised this. This is a very interesting and
strategic move that makes a lot of sense.

Jeff: I'm still
depressed. I like my Nexus 7. I like my Nexus 5. I like my Chrome book. I like
what they were doing.

Kevin: I'm fairly
sure Lenovo could make a good Chrome book.

Leo: Lenovo does
make a Chrome book.

Jeff: They do or
they are, they are going to. They are going to yeah.

Kevin: I assume
they were to make cheap ones. But I'm saying, they
could probably make a high end one too.

Jeff: That's part
of the deal probably too. Because that was the CES announcement form Lenovo.
They are going to do multiple Chrome books.

Leo: And by the
way, they said they are out of the phone business. Not out of the Chrome book
business.

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: Although, I
don't know what Google's play in the Chrome book business is.

Jeff: I can no
longer say that I live la vita Google.

Leo: Because
say, I live la vita Chrome OS or Android. It makes sense. Google doesn't need
to be in the business. They need to foster the business and let many companies
get involved. I think this isn't a bad thing at all.

Gina: It helps to
be all in.

Leo: Yeah.
That's what they are saying isn't it.

Gina: That's what
they were saying, ‘we were not all in'. They didn't want to invest the time and
resources to make Motorola competitive.

Leo: We shall
return. There is more to talk about, including our changed log in just a bit.
Gina Trapani is here from ThinkUp. How's it going?
Going well?

Gina: Going well. Going well.

Leo: Good. Love
my ThinkUp. thinkup.com, soon to be
open to all.

Gina: Yes.

Leo: ﻿﻿Jeff Jarvin from the City University of New York and
the author of Public Parts. Gutenberg the Geek is free
today, thanks to his students.

Jeff: It's only
99 cents folks.

Leo: Yeah you're
saving a buck. Is it a new semester beginning? Is that what's going on?

Jeff: Yes, it
is.

Leo: New
semester. And this is good, because most people assume that professors assign
their own books to make a little money. So, Jeff's proving...

Jeff: I plug them
a lot, but I don't assign them.

Leo: Also Mr.
Kevin Marks. Always a great pleasure to have Kevin in his
garden. Is it raining down there?

Kevin: No, it's
not. It's dry at the moment.

Leo: It will be.
We're having rain up here. We need it.

Jeff: You always
need it.

Leo: It's been a
very dry winter. I must say this, just to make Jeff and Gina feel bad. It was
in the 80's here last week.

Jeff: Oh, shut
up!

Leo: And we were
complaining, because we needed the rain. It's so warm. Gosh, I wish
it would rain. There it is coming your way.

Kevin: The reason it's raining is because it's...my son took the car to the
car wash yesterday and so it guarantees to make it rain.

Leo: So did Chad
apparently.

Chad: Yesterday I
got my car washed. Just yesterday.

Kevin: Exactly,
yesterday.

Leo: With the
car wash over here, it has a sign that says, 'Guaranteed free wash, if it
rains.'

Chad: Wait, which
one?

Leo: Rain Tree
over here.

Chad: Oh, I don't
use that one.

Leo: They'll
give you a free wash if it rains. I think it has to rain within a few days,
obviously. Our show today brought to you by Personal Capital. With Personal
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me, 'I'm starting this thing Personal Capital', I signed up then and I love it. personalcapital.com/twig I think it's time to
break out the horns. Time for another Google Change Log. Ladies and Gentleman, Gina Trapani with the latest from the Google.

Gina: Lego lovers
this one's for you. Build with Chrome.com. This is a site that Google graduated
from a Chrome experiment to an actual public website to help promote the new
Lego movie. Have you seen this?

Leo: No. This is
so cool.

Gina: Yeah, it's
pretty awesome. This site uses WebGL 3D graphics
technology to let users build any creation any virtual Lego they want, using
virtual Lego blocks. Very slick web-based interface. You drag the blocks, you choose the color...

Leo: Of course,
it's too complicated for me. I can't figure it out. And why do I have a map?
What is this map? I don't understand.

Gina: You have to
kind of play around with it a little. Now it should be showing you the base. Your Lego base. It doesn't seem to be.

Gina: You can add
bricks of different sizes and kind and connect them just like regular Legos.
It's pretty awesome. Once' you've made something, you sign in with Google+, you
can share your creation. You can look at stuff that other people have built on
the site as well. There is an explore option, when you first go to it. Buildwithchrome.com.

Leo: This is all
the bricks I've ever wanted.

Gina: Prepare to
loose many hours. Mine is not working well though.

Gina: There you
go.

Leo: Chad, how
come yours is working so well?

Gina: There you
go Chad. You got it.

Jeff: Chad's
smarter.

Leo: Chad's
smarter than I am. Maybe if I sign in with my Google+.

Gina: It's a
really nice, smooth interface.

Jeff: I'm getting
dizzy.

Leo: Chad's really
good with Lego. Mine is broken.

Chad: I blame Minecraft.

Gina: It is very Minecraft-y.

Kevin: That's the
thing that struck me, yeah.

Leo: No wonder
Chad is so good at it. Buildwithchrome.com

Gina: Buildwithchrome.com.

Jeff: There's not
that satisfying click then.

Chad: Oh, there
is! Can you hear the click, it goes...

Jeff: Oh neat!

Chad: I don't
know how to trash here... let me remove bricks. Whoa, it is like Minecraft and they just kind of float there.

Leo: There's
also a build academy. So, you can train to become a master builder. That's
good. So do the academy. Chad show this. This is nice.
This is the academy, shows you how to get started. "Every build beings
with a base plate, which you can rotate. Try it on your own."

Gina: So, okay, I
know we want to keep building Lego, but I should move along. Google's got a
new...

Jeff: Come back
to class now.

Gina: Google's
got a new OneBox. Search result answer. It's the As
the Crow Flies, distance calculation. So if you want to know the distance
between two places, these are places that you can fly or drive, you can just
enter query into the box. So, if you say, 'how far is it from Padaloma to Brooklyn, or how far is it from Brooklyn to
Hawaii', Google will display the distance, the 'As the Crow Flies', distance in OneBox results. Could be a really
fun party game as well. How far do you think it is from Hawaii...

Leo: I do this
all the time with maps, but it's so painful. And this is great. This is great.

Gina: And another
little tweak to Google's search results. Google search
pages now show the name of the site next to the URL and if it's a well-known
name, a well-known site that they have knowledge graph information about,
you'll see a small card with that information in it. So, you Google search TWIT
for example or Youtube, there is a little drop down,
a little kind of knowledge graph card that shows up and tells you, what the
entity is, who it is owned by and any other sort of knowledge graph facts
included there. So, I searched for TWIT, there was a little card there for
that. There was one for lifehacker. There is not one
for ThinkUp yet, because we haven't reached our
relevancy yet, but I am working on it. Yeah, see it says owned by Leo Laporte, which I guess links to your Google+ profile, I
imagine.

Leo: Or
Wikipedia. That's a Wikipedia entry.

Kevin: This is a
knowledge graph which is mostly Wikipedia. Well it actually says Wikipedia,
okay.

Leo: That's
really neat. It's very up to date too.

Gina: And finally
Google announced new designer frames for Glass. So, if you have already spent
$1500 on glass, you can now spend another $225 to get new custom frames that
have been designed in house by Google. They are much more normal looking glasses
than the visor like version. And Google also partnered with one of the
largest...sorry I lost the ...insurance company's...

Jeff: They are
better than the dorky...So, two problems I have. One, they don't make clear,
because I'm about to send in my old glass on the exchange program that they
have. First question, these work with Glass properly, you are not going to get
different Glass right?

Gina: Right. You
can actually remove the Glass apart from your current glass and snap them on to
the new frames, which apparently only work if the electronics are snapped on.
And apparently, it's very smooth and easy transition and it just snaps on and
works.

Jeff: What do you
mean it only works if it's snapped on?

Gina: I believe
that the new frames are designed for Glass specifically. I'm not sure exactly
how this works, but I don't think that the frames will stay on your head if
Glass isn't attached to them.

Jeff: Oh, I
see.

Leo: They are
Glass.

Jeff: So, you
can't just take the Glass off your glasses when you go into the movie, but we
don't want to go there again.

Leo: That would
be a nice feature though. Why can't you just unsnap it?

Jeff: The
reaction to that last week, it was so polarized. Some said, that I was being a
horrible jerk, some said that you were being a
horrible jerk. It was amazing. But everybody loves Gina. Everybody said, poor
Gina.

Gina: But I
realized, I really didn't say what I thought. I could see both of your points
of view but in the end just to make sure...I was with Jeff in the end. If I
were in a locker room, it's not quite the same in women's bathrooms, but if I
was in a gym locker room, I would put the glasses on top of my head at the same
time. I didn't want to open that can of worms again.

Jeff: Leo's
getting ready to shoot. Here's my other question, I swear and since Gina you
have Glass too, there's a problem in the form. Every time I and many other
people went to try to buy them, it says 'hey become an
explorer.' No, I am a fricking explorer, let
me buy the frames. And I can't figure out how to buy them.

Gina: Is that a
multiple account sign in thing?

Jeff: No, I don't
think so. Now I have my Glass transferred to Buzzmachine,
to my apps account.

Gina: Oh you do,
okay. But when you become an explorer, they white list your account. So they
may have white-listed your Gmail account. So try logging in, try seeing if you
are signed in as your other account. Maybe it's some weirdness around that.
When I went to go pick up Glass, they manually added me to some sort of white
list. They asked me for my Gmail address and did it. So that might have been
the issue if it said that you should become explorer.

Jeff: Just do me
a favor here folks, look at the four frames, which one should I buy?

Leo: There are
four frames? I thought there was one. So they are all titanium. I like titanium
frames. And how much are they?

Gina: $225 on top
of the $1500.

Leo: That's not
bad.

Jeff: Plus the
lens you then have to buy to fit into it.

Leo: Now, there
are companies that I have seen here who sell...optics planets who sell adapters
for Google Glass, so that you could then attach them to prescription
glasses.

Jeff: That's
thin, which isn't as thin as Split. That's bold.

Leo: Oh, that's
your look right there. Can you get your lips to look like that too?

Leo: Yeah, you
got to match it all up, there you go. You look like John Boehner, it's not working.

Jeff: If I look
like John Boehner, it's like this...

Leo: Boehner was
darker than Obama, that was the weirdest thing. Has he
been in a tanning booth? What's going on with him? And of course, the whitest
man in the world, is our Vice-President. This is
better. Smile Jeff.

Gina: I think
those are for you.

Leo: Yeah sure,
that's a good look.

Jeff: This is
freaky.

Leo: Turn your
head a little bit to the left Jeff.

Gina: Turn, turn.
No the other way. Yeah.

Leo: There you
go. Now when he smiles it works, so it's good.

Jeff: Okay screen
shots to come in.

Gina: They need
an Android app that lets you try on the frames on your face.

Leo: Yeah,
doesn't Warby Parker do that? That
was the rumor that they were going to do a deal with Warby. They should have. I don’t know. I think that's your
look right there Jeff. That's kind of the horn-rimmed Professorial.

Gina: The glass
hardware is still too big, like it still looks... better than the visor but
still. Well, that's all I got.

Leo: And that's
the Google Change Log. Does it mean that if they are dong frames that it is
imminent that they are going to make Glass a consumer product?

Jeff: They
already said they would.

Gina: I think so.
They have been pushing updates. It's not like though nothing has changed with
it for a while, I think they are doing framers, pushing out updates, I think
they are committed to Glass. Committed for the consumer
release. It better be this year.

Leo: You just
saw Larry Page in his statement on the Motorola acquisition mention
specifically wearable. He didn't say Glass, he said wearable.

Gina: Over half
of our ThinkUp subscribers use Gmail. It's amazing
that how many people use it and how it really can throw off a lot of things
when it's down. I mean it's just never down. Yeah 50 minutes without the...

Leo: I didn't
notice. It must have been a time where I wasn't paying any attention. Youtube comments didn't work. Google+ didn't work.

Kevin: It wasn't
just Gmail, I think it was the user graph thing that
went down.

Leo: So, that 's kind of interesting. So, there is a service that
Gmail, +, both use?

Kevin: It was the
contacts thing from Gmail and while I was there it got made into this
centralized service that everyone could use. Every Google product could use and
that's what all this + and everything is built on top of.

Leo: So it was
this identity service that went down basically.

Kevin: There is an
internal service that is all the profile information and it was migrated from
being your contact details, inside your individual Gmail thing, to being a very,
very large database of everyone's contact and everyone's personal
profile.

Leo: So that
would for instance, if that’s the case then you would have Google connect go
down as well or whatever Google calls it, the log in or centralized log in

Kevin: No the log
in is separate from that. I don’t think that went down that thing hasn’t seen
in like nine years because that is like
looked down on like everything else but I think the profiling stopped the
ability to pull information about people
the bit that was down, and that’s was heavily called by these services they lost it as well.

Leo: Here’s the
picture of Larry Page with Lang Mon Ch’ing, the Chairman and CEO of Lenovo
apparently, at Mountian View right now to seal that
deal. This is the picture that Google released with the announcement. We are
giving you giant robot…

Gina, Jeff (laughing)

Leo: we are giving you this giant robot, it looks
like he just bought a used robot, I am sorry but it does.

Kevin: it’s a Trojan
horse, it gets there and little Google cars come out of it.

Leo: If the
Chinese regulators don’t approve this deal it will be THIS picture that did it.

Kevin: I want to
ask a question by the way, does this reflect the relationship with the Chinese
in any way?

Leo: I don’t
know, So that’s news that I don’t think anybody had that news and it was very
interesting Kevin Marks but because of your internal knowledge of how this is
all wired

Kevin: I have not
seen a post mortem on it yet nobody wrote a post mortem posts but I may have
just missed it

Leo: I have not
either.

Jeff: Charles
Arthur of the Guardian lets puts this up Google’s original evaluation for Motorola mobility will be 2.9 billion cash , 5.5 billion patents , 730 million customer
relationships, 2.6 billion goodwill, 670 million net assets and then I guess
that’s plus so I guess that’s separate from the setup business.

Leo: So, they are
keeping the Goodwill but they are selling the phones.

Jeff: Yeah

Kevin: When, as
they say, you can write down Goodwill whenever you feel like it so that means
you can take it as a loss when you adjust your books.

Leo: New patent
for Google glass, this is a newer design, this just appeared at the US patent
and trademark office. Does it look different? It says it’s different, but that
looks, it’s kind of, I don’t know you’re the guys with the glasses!

Kevin: Are those
actually earphones as opposed to version connection things?

Leo: Yeah, well,
we knew that was the new version of Google glass right, it had headphones.

Kevin: I don’t
know I did not pay it much attention.

Leo: Yeah it’s on
both sides, so that’s what’s new.

Gina: This piece
of hardware on both sides doesn’t extend back as far as the current one does,
so they are lessening the hardware, Unfortunately they are at the back of your
ear that you don’t care about right? You care about what’s on your head.

Leo: Well this
was all battery back here, right?

Gina: Yeah, right
it was a battery.

Kevin: This is
part that it kind of balanced, right? Instead of it falling off, you got the
weight back here instead of it falling off the front.

Gina: Right.

Leo: Erwin come here; bring your Google glass over
here. So Erwin I saw you had A USB connector, is that to keep it charged? So this new design eliminates this whole temple
piece back here.

Gina: Yeah

Leo: Yeah, but
that’s the battery isn’t it? Oh that’s the phone connector though, too. Yeah,
Erwin’s visiting from Hong Kong. How long have you had your Google glass? Since November? And you’re wearing it over prescription
glasses and your wearing all the time? Are you going to get the new, he says he
doesn’t wear it when he drives, at least not in California. You never want to
get stopped. The other thing is no longer is it over your right eyebrow it’s a
reversed image it’s over your left eyebrow, yeah.

Jeff: That’s
confusing, you know the problem with all of these is that you can’t fold them
like glasses, and put them in your pocket.

Leo: So there’s
no easy way to do that?

Jeff: So if I go
to the movie it would be difficult for me to take them off. Because
I couldn’t fold them.

Gina: But these
new designs, they’re foldable, right?

Kevin: Well, the
glasses can hang around right.

Jeff: Oh Yeah,
I’m not doing that.

Leo: Oh come on,
you’re going to do it with your readers any day now so you might as well just
do it with your glass.

Kevin: Ooh
there’s a jewelry opportunity here I can see it.

Leo: Yes! A
layette a Google layette, I’m waiting for the Google monocle.

Gina: To go back
to the Gmail or the people graft outage, first, the Google SRE’S site
reliability engineers, were doing an AMA and asked me something
on Reditt at the time the outages happened.

Leo: Interesting!
That’s the problem, yeah.

Gina: And then
Yahoo on their official Twitter account, tweeted that Gmail was down and then
later deleted the tweet and issued an apology saying that they shouldn’t have
mentioned it.

Leo: It was their
mistake that was the mistake, because it was just a news thing they didn’t snark they just thought that it was down, the mistake was
the apology.

Kevin: It’s a
news feed and Gmail being down was a story.

Leo: That’s a
news story it’s not a snark, for them to apologize is
to admit something that did not happen, and to raise questions about why it
happened. But who knows. So it said at
10:55 a.m., this is the official post the internal system that generates
configurations information that tells other systems how to behave encountered a
software bug and generated an incorrect configuration, which was sent to live
services over the next 15 minutes, causing user requests for their data to be
ignored in these services and generating errors. Wow!

Gina: It gives
you a glimpse at how complex this machine is right? So the code that writes code wrote the wrong
code that which then pushed code and caused other codes to respond with a
failure.

Leo: Get this,
engineers, this is all from the Google official blog. Engineers were still
debugging 12 minutes later when the same system having automatically cleared
the original error, generated a new
correct configuration , 20 minutes later at 11:13 a.m. and began sending it, in
other words it self- corrected, errors subsided rapidly at this time, by 11:30
the correct configuration was everywhere, all user services were restored. In
other words, they say this happened automatically and was fixed.

Jeff: That’s
really interesting

Kevin: That’s
pretty cool but the challenge was or for somebody to cause an outage at Google
it had to be some kind of cascading failure because they have redundancy, that
any given thing will cause a failure but it’s when something chains to some
other system and some other system; that’s when things get horribly bad, and
the big ones that we have seen they have always had something like that happen
where something causes something else to
happen because something else happened and therefore, they are blocking each
other. The system when Emerson goes down and what happens over time is they
find these new found ways to protect against them. It’s interesting they have
now gotten a system that protects things generically.

Leo: Yeah, did it
affect, according to this blog it’s by Ben Trainer, It says, according to
Google posts, it says Gmail, Google plus and calendar and documents were
affected, for about 25 minutes, 10% of users for as much as 30 minutes Longer,
so..

Kevin: Did it say
Tube was affected or

Leo: No, Gmail, Google Plus and calendar and
documents

Jeff: The
comments on YouTube because now those are done by Google plus

Leo: I guess
that’s not considered a separate service, there’s actually another bug that’s
actually considered kind of a different bug, and Google calendar was for awhile adding others to your private events without
warning. So fyour having a
birthday party tonight and somebody shows up you didn’t invite, it’s not your
fault.

Kevin: I just
have this vision that’s how Cramer gets to a meeting in the company on
Seinfeld, the modern Seinfeld

Kevin: If that’s
the same one I think it was Is that them being over smart so if you’re making
notes to someone and you include their email address or then Google would say
oh you were trying to arrange a meeting, so for say contact fred@smith.com, as a note to myself in the
calendar then it would sends a meeting invitation to fred@smith.com if you write it in the title.
That was the bargain you can see how they thought of that as the thing but you
could, but clearly you don’t want them doing that or at least you want a
confirmation dialogue.

Leo: Yeah and probably
you shouldn’t use email addresses anyway in your event titles. So this guy
named Terrence Eden, who says he writes about mobiles, Shakespeare and user
policies, I don’t know where the Shakespeare comes in but anyway, he said “My
wife likes to send reminders to herself in Google calendar, well she added a
note to a personal Google calendar reading email Alice@example.com to discuss the pay raise
and set the date for a few months from now. A few months later, Alice her boss,
sent her a meeting accepted email!

All: laughing

Kevin: If you hit
the smart create button click on it and say if you could do that then I
wouldn’t be surprised but if you click, add and say, meeting with.

Leo: Be careful
whose email you use here because they might think… Leo@twit.tv because I don’t read that I always seen a would you like email an invitation to
this person dialogue box an which you could then say no send

Gina: Send don’t
send yeah

Leo: yeah, though
here’s the video of it, yeah you know its quick entry it is what you said the
quick entry that’s what you are trying to do. If you put an ad in there, it does
location if you put a time or date it automatically figures it out. Now see
there’s the configuration but see he clicks do not send and it still sends

Kevin: see that’s
what I got when I got there it said send email invitations, yeah so the quick
entry is trying to pause the

Jeff: Whoops

Gina: That’s a
bug.

Leo: Actually I
have had that happen, I have seen this bug. But unlike Terrence I just wasn’t
paying attention. I always make, I put somebody’s email in calendar stuff when
I do a show, like put the email or whatever, your email or whatever, Gina in
the calendar and say, don’t send an email because I want the Moto to think I’m
in a meeting and unless there’s somebody in the calendar event it won’t be a
meeting so I always put names and Chad maybe. Do you get emails from me like
every week?

Charles: Yes, I
get a “this week in tech is starting now.” Did you see in that video he was
showing, if he didn’t do the quick ad it didn’t do the pop up?

Leo: Oh, so it isn’t the quick ad, that’s the
problem.

Charles: It was
when you click and click edit and then the new event and it just did it
automatically in that video.

Leo: He said Google has tried to be clever; some
Lisa Britt they all say the same thing; is tried to be clever here it’s failed,
just because I’m talking about someone doesn’t mean I’m talking to someone,
that is exactly right.

Jeff: Yeah

Leo: But again
it’s a failure of artificial intelligence.

Jeff: You can
imagine how much worse it could have been .

Leo: Yeah

Jeff: Talk to
boss about resigning or talk to employee about firing them!

Leo: (Gasping) Well let me check my mail, well that’s going to take a while
to do that, yeah I don’t even know what the password is.

Jeff: No wonder
you don’t respond to my emails

Leo: No, don’t email
me there, you know better than that, don’t email at leo@twit.tv that’s that? I’m going to log in, fortunately I have Lastpass to remember to see if I got an invitation from
Kevin Marks. Nope not yet.

Gina: Well, they
fixed this right?

Leo: Well yeah
they fixed it

Kevin: It did say
awaiting a guest

Leo: Well maybe
it’s not in important and unread maybe it’s in everything else

Chad: No, it’s still doing it so here I can do it live.

Leo: Did you get
one?

Chad: So here,
delete and notify guest. I f I’m here and I just add an event and immediately
hit edit event and then I type in something, so I have email Leo@twit.tv to ask him to stop leaving Ozzie to poop
at my desk and I hit save, one second, let me hit and then jump back in; you’ve
been added as a guest on this event.

Leo: Didn’t ask?
Well that’s normal but it doesn’t mean I got an email. See the thing about
email guest, but Kevin’s’ seeing that thing about awaiting as well.

Kevin:I seen that awaiting is quite suspicious.

Leo: Yeah, like
that means in theory it’s emailed me an invite, but I haven’t seen an invite so

Gina: At the
bottom of this gorge story it says Google says it’s aware of the issue and
Google is actively working to fix it so, maybe it is not fixed.

Leo: You
cancelled the event Chad? I got an email that you cancelled the event. It’s
been removed from my calendar but it was added to my calendar and I didn’t even
say anything.

Kevin: Well, go
to your calendar on that.

Leo: I don’t have
a calendar at leo@twit.tv but it’s been removed so we got to do it, I know,
enough. It’s a problem!

Kevin: So the
moral to the story is, do not type people’s email
addresses into invitations unless you want to invite them!

Gina: Yes

Leo: Because
Google is very, very helpful. You know this is the problem with robots and computers
in general they don’t understand anything but they’re trying to be helpful.

Jeff: Fix the problem!

Kevin: But this
is the problem with the AI project right? They are trying to build us a system
that works.

Leo: Maybe deep
mind will fix this.

Gina: Deep mind?

Kevin: Did you
see the state of the Union one?

Leo: No!

Kevin: Well, I
put it in the rundown

Leo: I’ll check
that, I’ll run down

Jeff: Gmail just
saved me when I cut out the wrong John in an email and it am another one in there.

Leo: Did you give
then a good job! For that?

Kevin: Yeah that
can be fun, especially when there are three people with the same name or the
same color, I want the meetings like, well, during the State of the Union, a
friend of mine searched the State of the Union and it showed a link to a CNN
story with a picture and link to a President Nixon.

Leo: Was it this year or was it linked to picture
in 1967?

Kevin: It was
during the State of the Union, it’s at the bottom of the

Leo: Oh I see it,
oh tantec did this

Kevin: This is an
extension of the knowledge graft stuff and I, it’s like a free association
tryout, they are trying to make these machines have right brains and they
aren’t having right brains they are like, oh President of the United States.

Leo: Oh, Here’s
the president Richard Nixon! I’ll help you with a small picture of him.

Kevin: And I’m
not sure where that comes from?

Leo: It’s the
first thing they found under State of the Union I guess?

Kevin: how?

Leo: It maybe
came from CNN, you know what that’s probably what happened. Well Tontec says there was no Nixon image on the links page.

Jeff: No, the
images often, very often do not match pictures from elsewhere.

Kevin: So I saw
that with the feature Gina talked about with the grafts , the knowledge graft
things being attached to stuff, in a search for my name on various websites I
found different little cards about me that had bits of different information, they had different places, then
I actually go on my own website which I
carefully marked off with micro formats and stuff and entered them and they
would recall that but they would crawl
here and there and a couple other places and come back with, “this is what we
found and what we think we know.”

Leo: I got an
idea from a new feature on the show, the Google glitch of the week, just where
the computer did something really dumb trying to do something smart because you know what this just the
beginning.

Kevin: My theory
about AI is that they will have to build a sort of self-certification AI which
is the latest theories about how our brains work. If the lower levels of our
brains decide something unconsciously and then this sort of personal merit part
of our brain makes up a reason why we did it. And there’s all these wonderful
experiments where they can do this by getting people to this by sharing
something with their non dominant eye and then they
will then confabulate an explanation about what they were thinking about that thing with the part of the
brain that does speech with the other
eye. There are a bunch of experiments like this and which is basically showing
we decide something, we make an association and then we come up with a
plausible sounding explanation to ourselves as to why we did that. I suspect
that’s going to be the next phase of AI. I suppose that they would really get
good at that and that’s why they showed that showed that picture of Nixon.

Leo: You know
it’s really sad and I hope this doesn’t become a trend but we are seeing it in
San Francisco, protesters not only defacing and protesting the busses of Google
and Apple and other big corporations that have a bus for their San Francisco
employees to bus then down, the complaint is of course, the gentrification of
San Francisco, the increase of rent and all of that stuff and now here is one:
a protester shows up at the Berkley doorstep of the guy who wrote the code for
the self-driving car; an image was distributed by a group called Counterforce,
Anthony Levendowski in an unconscionable world of
surveillance , control and automation, he is also your neighbor, urging people
to go to his home on Tuesday and protest! This is so sad.

Jeff: We don’t
want to fall into the Perkins, comparing this to a Crystal knocked.

Leo: No, it’s not
Crystal knocked, but he said of course, the founder of Perkins in a Wall Street
journal piece, he likened this kind of stuff to a progressive Crystal knocked:
the Nazi persecution of Jewish shopkeepers by breaking their windows.

Jeff: The most
extreme example of Godwin’s Law I have ever seen.

Leo: Yea, I also
don’t think it is but what he is saying is what we are seeing is demonization
of computer scientists.

Jeff: Fine, I
don’t want to argue with that but comparing that to a murder of 6,000 people is
not exactly correct.

Leo: It’s not
saying that it’s killing six million Jews but, it is nevertheless, a demonization
of computer scientists.

Kevin: Did you
see him when he went off on Blumberg? That was even more.

Jeff: I could not
find that online, is that online?

Kevin: I don’t
know, I would assume that Blumberg would post it.

Leo: He is older
and out of touch, I give him, well, let’s not. I understand what he was trying
to say, he said it in a very ham handed and inappropriate way. However, I do
understand what he was trying to say which is, and I think this is something
that could be potentially feared, is the mob turning against technology.

Jeff: Well, a
more important aspect of this too, and again, I hated following what he was
saying because it is such idiocy, but the new 1% is the technology community.
If you take my argument that technology leads to efficiency over growth, it
leads to greater profitability and productivity and thus wealth in the hands of
the technology people, at the expense of huge numbers of jobs, not directly
from robotics or any of that kind of stuff but just through new efficiencies
and new networks.

Leo: Well, let me
just say that you called me a luddite last week in a
way that highly inappropriate and I resent it.

Jeff: Oh, I’m
going to picket your office!

Leo: But this is
the Luddites because Ed Ludd and his protesters broke
the mechanized looms as they were being put out of work by this technology,
That is where the word ludi comes from, Ned Ludd may be a mythical character but nevertheless it’s
where this came from and that was in 1779 so, the more things change, the more
things stay the same.

Kevin: But luddite was an explicitly job displacement so that is…

Leo: There is a
legitimate and this is an economic protest, its housing displacement, we are
being evicted by the gentrification, this new 1% is taking away our city.

Jeff: I say, would you prefer that the entirety of the economic benefit
and the jobs and everything of the technology revolution happened in Cleveland? Or San Francisco? So you are complaining about
success, we are the American thing.

Kevin: I was
having this debate on Twitter. I see the analogy is like they are sending busses
to Brooklyn and Manhattan to take the employees over to their jobs in Newark
where they feed them all day then send them back and call it a day. If you
actually look at the distance it’s actually the same travel

Jeff: Newark
would be delighted to have.

Gina: Laughing

Leo: I think
Mountain View is very much like Newark; that is actually a very good analogy.
The reason they do it is because no one wants to live in Mountain View they
want to live in San Francisco or Manhatten.

Kevin: Yeah,
they’re complaining because they are clogging up their city bus stops with
these busses.

Leo: But yeah, if
you took all of the people out of the busses and have and have them in their
cars it would be a hell of a lot worse for everybody.

Kevin: Yeah and
obviously it might be much better if they have subsidized and put WIFI on it

Leo: Never the
less, I think what this I really about, a legitimate point here is the
fundamental problem of income inequality, which is a growing problem
nationwide.

Kevin: And that
at some point Tom Perkins is polling a poster child for the poor

Jeff: you know
these poor people are just really getting on my nerves, what was the watch part
of the Perkins thing?

Kevin: It was
something about Rolex watches and as an aside, Perkins said for this watch , I could buy a six pack of Rolexes and then the interviewer
followed up with him and he said well it’s a Richard May and it was given to me
by the company that built my yacht.. This is like fracto conspicuous consumptions

Leo: He is too
rich and too out of touch, He can’t stop, that’s the problem.

Kevin: There is
this weird problem, it’s the fundamental of atributionaries which in psychology is called “when I do
something it’s because I’m great, when you do something it’s because you’re
weird.

Leo: Here’s the
Blumberg piece

Blumberg: Silicon Valley is, I
think Kleiner Perkins itself over the years has
created, pretty close to a million jobs and we are still doing it. It’s absurd
to demonize the rich, for being rich and for doing what the rich do, which is
get richer by creating opportunity for others. How do you feel threatened? I
said I don’t feel personally threatened, I feel however, that as a class, I
think we are beginning to engage in class warfare, I think the rich as a class
are threatened, through higher taxes, higher regulation

Leo: “Get off of
my case! I want to move to an Island! You know, we have an island for you, you
and Lovey can move there, bring your Rolexes…” (laughter)
But he also has a point,

Kevin: He has a
point, but it’s this dreadful trickle down point that was made 20 years ago and
has shown not to actually work. He hasn’t created that much wealth with his
yachts and his watches. It’s job security…

Leo: I think I
agree, Venture capitalists aside, technology is a democratizing

Kevin: It can be
both! The Luddites had a point. They were being displaced.

Leo: Yes, it’s
only a matter of time before all the travel agents rise up and go to the Expedia
offices and with torches and pitch forks

Kevin : It is a structural problem that we have economically
which is the kinds of jobs that we
create with technology are much fewer in number and require much more
qualifications to be employed with them.

Leo: I do think
there is more opportunity there’s opportunity if you have education, there is a
lot of opportunity.

Kevin: The large
swath of the American middle class, which were people who were doing factory
work and things like that, that’s gone.

Leo: We have seen
this coming for 20 something years , Jeremy Rifkin wrote about this literally
almost 30 years ago in “The end of work”, we knew this was happening .

Kevin: There was
a fascinating thing from peer research, which I am going to stick the link in
the chat room, which was fewer Americans identify as middle class, this is like
quite striking so from 53% saying they were middle class in 2008, now 44% say
middle class and 40% say lower class, up from 25%, so there is two things going
on here one is the notion that everyone thinks they are middle class which has
been the premise in American politics for a long time and the other part of
this is the Occupy movement saying actually there is a big problem of the 99% and there are people who are
taking money from you and there is definitely a clear sense of loss of
aspiration there, a loss of this and saying oh yes we can all be middle class
and see it kick in, like 2011, there is a step function here.

Jeff: There is a
drone coming for you Kevin

Leo: Be very
careful what you say next Mr. Marks, it could be your
last.

Jeff: So Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from MIT who wrote “Race Against the Machine” the Kindle single, have a new book out,
and they are exploring this. I had started reading but it was boring. I think
it’s a gigantic story we haven’t dealt with. I wrote about it a year and a half
ago, about the notion of a jobless future; we are simply going to have fewer
jobs and we are not dealing with that.

Leo: That was
what Rifkin said in 1995, actually he said it earlier than that, but, anyway
all right we are going to take a break because this is depressing.

Jeff: And I have
got to go take my Lexus to the dealer and I can’t understand it keeps taking me through poor
neighborhoods I have got to get that GPS fixed.

Leo: That’s a
joke, Boy there is no laughter at all

Gina: no, No, I’m
with you I am giving you a smile

Leo: I bought an
$1800 dollar toilet the other day

Jeff: laughing

Kevin: And you’re
going to sail it on the sea.

Leo: I am making
jobs for people making toilets!

Jeff: You know
the people did ask you to stop with the poop on the show and it was my fault.

Leo: Who is people? Four people
on Twitter! That’s not, people that’s four people on Twitter that’s a different
thing.

Jeff: This is the
third poop in a row week.

Leo: I have not
mentioned

Jeff: Everybody
poops, it’s poop.

Gina: If my
daughters taught me anything, it’s that poop is a big part of life.

Jeff: Freud said
it’s this fundamental thing!

Leo: Let’s talk
about Squarespace, this is a much nicer topic. Shall we?

Jeff: Sure you
don’t want a buffer here, Leo?

Leo: I should buffer,
I should briefly buffer. Everybody just look at your Rolex for a moment or
whatever watch your architect happened to give you for building your yacht and
say toc tic.

Leo: No, I do
that I think that income inequality is a growing problem; it’s clear from the
numbers and you know what maybe these protests from San Francisco are just the
beginning of something that could be much more dramatic.

Jeff: Occupy Wall
Street, that was aimed at bankers and this is now aimed at technology.

Gina: Yeah occupy
Wall Street.

Leo: Wait a
minute, here is a new picture from the chat room, thank you FN Dunn, for your
Photoshop buffer, low mileage 2.91 billion, the sale
has been made. A surprisingly large number people came into the chartroom and
said, Lenovo just bought Motorola have they talked about it? You’ve got to
watch the show from the beginning if you want to get it. Our show today brought
to you by squarespace.com, the all-in-one platform that makes it very easy to
create your next website. You know I think this is a, well for all the issues I
have to say; one thing that does democratize this world is the ability to create
your own website for as little as $8 a month at squarespace.com. If you make or
maybe you make something that you could sell, you would have a global
marketplace for $32 dollars a month you could do Ecommerce, unlimited products,
whether real, digital or services, real time carrier, shipping label printing,
integrated accounting $32 dollars a month. And the world is out there ready to
buy your stuff. $8 dollars a month for a personal site, the unlimited
professional site $16 dollars a month when you buy an annual plan. Every Squarespace site looks unique, in fact, they make it easy
to start, it’s free, you don’t need a credit card or anything, just go to
squarespace.com, click the get started button and you will pick from 29
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ready, that means your site’s going to look great on any size screen and will
have Ecommerce built in. If you choose, pick the template you want, of course, content
is never tied to presentation so enter in your content or import your content;
they have importers for all the major blog API’s , look at all the pictures, all the links will be preserved, the comments too,
and then, if you don’t like it, push a button and you get a new design, and all
the content remains, it’s just beautifully done . The code is so elegant, its
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Time for Gina Trapani’s’ tip of the week

Gina: Just in
time for the Super bowl, Twitter has some new search filters and I’m kind of
excited about this, when you search Twitter you can now filter results by
people, photos, videos, news. This is my favorite one, you can say, just show
me tweets from people I follow or just show me tweets from people near me. So
much easier to kind of go back and see your friends’ tweets or back topics or
hash tags or whatever, and you can try it out with the Super bowl, you can see
if any of your friends have talked about the game, or any of the ads you could
say just show me the videos with the word super bowl in the tweet, so you know
commercials before they go live or after they get posted. Really a nice way to
kind of honor old tweets, I went back and favorited,
you know a bunch of my friends got notifications that I had favorited what they had favorited months ago because I had just
searched around keywords and found good stuff that I had missed and kind of
flown by me in my stream.

Leo: Very Cool!
Of course you should have ThinkUp as well, that way
you know everything that’s going on, on twitter and all of the people following
you and all your most popular tweets and all that stuff.

Gina: Yeah, well
of course, and Facebook.

Leo: And Facebook
oh! I forgot to add my Facebook, I’ve got to do that. I Love Thinkup.

Gina: Thanks

Leo: You know,
look

Jeff: I was showing
it to folks just this week.

Leo: This one
cracks me up; did you see that free advertising followed Leo Laporte?

Gina: Yeah

Jeff: Finally!!!

Leo: No that’s
somebody that follows me; I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. You
see my most popular tweets from years gone by with lists I am on.

Leo: You know, an
object number B bracket P is no method F, I think you might want to go to work
on that, Gina.

Gina: That’s a
Google charts API bug. Google? What is up with that?

Leo: What, what?
That should be a nice graft there, that’s the only one I saw, though,
everything else looks good. Oh, what? Wait…

Gina: Oh, what?
(He’s surfing on her web site and something is not working.) Oh, no! Well, I’ve
got a bug to fix tonight!

Leo:Hmmmm! (She’s laughing) By the way, I had 42 people retweet
my posts, 112 people replied, 42 favorites, that’s pretty good on a tweet!

Gina: That is
pretty good, that’s some serious activity.

Jeff: Which tweet
was that?

Leo: That was me
bitching about my GPS. “I keep getting pulled through poor people’s
neighborhoods!” No, you know I have this fancy Audi, I shouldn’t have, you
know, it was a big mistake.

Kevin: Oh, don’t
tell us, don’t.

Leo: The GPS
doesn’t work, and they say, “Oh, we don’t have a fix. Just use your phone.”

Gina: That’s the
fix? Just use your phone?

Jeff: Hmmm!

Leo: By the way,
it’s beautiful, it has Google Earth, I can zoom, straight view, but it shows me here, I should show you, it shows me going off road,
sometimes I’m in Bodega Bay!

Kevin: Sue them!

Leo: Sue them?
Can you sue them for something like that? I guess if I drove off road,

Kevin: Yeah,
there is this liability issue.

Leo: I can sue; I
think you have an obligation to look out the window, don’t you? Am I wrong?

Jeff: There have
been cases, I do believe.

Leo: Really? I
should look up the case law. I just want them to fix it! I like the car in
other respects, I just want them to fix the GPS. I’ll
show you the picture. This is the smoking gun picture. I am driving down the
road but apparently it is in the middle of the woods! (laughing)

Leo: Oh that’s
what it is, before they built the road, Google Earth is saying this is a new
feature of Google earth, (laughing) Google prehistoric earth; I think I see a
dinosaur down there... Kevin Marks, you have a thing you’d like to talk about,
a tip you would like to share with us?

Kevin: A couple
of things. One is it’s home group website club tonight in both San Francisco
and Portland, so if you want to chat about building your own websites and any
web things it’s 6:30 p.m. tonight, we have now a video link between the two, chat
about indie web starts and web sites, that happens tonight and it’s every two
weeks, every other Wednesday.

Kevin: Yeah, I
know, it’s interesting, it’s a nice group of people and it’s trying the build
the web of your own staff primarily and then use the social networks to share
it, that’s the sort of cool thing about it. It’s a nice group. The other thing
I wanted to mention was model a view culture, which is a new magazine about the
deeper perspectives on technology and some of the stuff we talked about in the
middle of the show today about its impact on society and what’s happening and
things like that so that’s a Shandy Kane’s new startup;
she’s been in many different companies and she quit that and got this magazine
so that’s very interesting, I recommend that.

Leo: Very nice!

Gina: Very cool.

Leo: Cool, what
the URL again?

Kevin: I think
its Model View Culture.

Leo: ModelViewculture.com
Mr. Jeffery Jarvis, your number?

Jeff: I have so
many.

Leo: Give them
all!

Jeff: We could do
the 100 seconds that it took to fire two thirds of Patche’s staff in a voice message…

Leo: What?

Jeff: We could do
Prince sues 22 now former fans for 1 million dollars each,

Leo: Yeah I saw
that, what’s he suing them for? You’re a fan, I sue you!

Jeff: Yeah, we
could do the Guardian says blogs turned 20, I’m not sure I agree with that so
I’m going to skip that one, for the 5th year Google is the best
place to work but I think I will settle here on an old Lagos patent Ringo wins
1.36% of ad words revenue…

Leo: Oh yeah, I
forgot that, that was actually in our run down, I should have mentioned, that is
huge! Is Google going to appeal?

Jeff: Oh, yeah!

Leo: So what is
the patent?

Jeff: The patent,
I read it earlier…

Leo: 1.2% of ad
words revenue has got to be a lot of money!

Jeff: It’s 1.36%
so I’ll just take that rounding error, or are you just lost?

Leo: The rounding
error alone would buy you a very nice home in San Francisco.

Jeff: The ad
words program was freaked by Google after the Ringo verdict wasn’t colorfully different
from the old infringing problem.

Leo: Oh man, that
is terrible, so I presume there is room to appeal this?

Jeff: Jackson followed
the methodology laid out in an East Texas case in which Yahoo was found to infringe
on an advertising patent by a famed patent troll and it’s just one more of this
stuff but Jesus, 1.36% of Google AD WORDS?

LEO: It’s good
money, nice work if you can get it!

Jeff: Yep. Can I
tell another story real quick please?

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: I steer my yacht out of Davos (laughing) and
come into Zurich airport to go up to the hotel for the night since I have an
early flight out the next morning and I stop by the Starbucks and I can’t stop
by Starbucks today in Davos because there aren’t any and I can’t get decaf
coffee and I have to have decaf coffee and

Leo: I can’t
believe there is no Starbucks in Davos.

Jeff: It is
tough. Well actually the café Klatch in Davos is one of the best places in the
world for coffee. So I go into a basement Starbucks in the Zurich airport and I
go up and I say “Gutenavent”
and I ask for a medium decaf skim latte. Name, please. Jeff. The guy looks up
and he says Twig?

Leo: What?

Jeff: And so the
picture is in there of… I forgot the name, Chad can you put the picture up?

Leo: I saw it
actually on your Google bus it’s such a cute picture it’s so great

Jeff Can you remember his name? I can’t remember his name,

Gina: It’s
adorable!

Leo: Isn’t it
cute? He is a TWIG fan and he is working
at the Starbucks,

Jeff: Tense,
that’s his name.

Leo: That’s a
Tibetan name. That’s a Sherpa name, I wonder if he is
from, he looks like he’s from Tibet.

Jeff: So he said,
“Oh, can we take a picture?” And I said, “I’ve got to have one too.” So the
fellow took a picture of us which I just think was great.

Leo: Isn’t that
great!

Gina: That’s
fantastic!

Jeff: This is the
power of Leo Laporte; it’s happened to me in Munich,
it’s happened to me in Zurich and it happens to me that people recognize me from
this wonderful show. Thank you, Bless you, Leo Laporte!

Leo: All over zee
world! I recognize you must be the Davos guy? Let me see your Rolex! I don’t
have a pick of the week, I was going to pick this
Talon app, which is a new Twitter app, which is gorgeous and beautiful. Have
you guys talked about this at All About Android?

Gina: Which app
is this?

Leo: It’s a new
page Twitter app called Talon

Gina: Oh, No, we
haven’t talked about Talon.

Leo: It’s specifically for KITKAT, it’s quite
beautiful but, and I was going to recommend it but it has killed my battery…
and they even say that, because this will do streaming of your tweets and he
does say, I don’t recommend this because it could kill your battery. its T-a-l-o-n, I can’t
remember how much it is, I think it’s $4 or $5.

Jeff: But you
know that’s nothing compared to the cost of this wrist watch. (laughing)

Leo: So, Talon,
there it is, Talon for Twitter.

Gina: I had
looked at it and I thought I’d use it for a couple of days and I hadn’t gotten up in the arena and I just had
not gotten around to installing it . SOO
YOU LIKE IT BUT IT KILLED YOUR BATTERY?

Leo: it’s
wonderful and one of the reasons I want talk about it, is the story about the
author is kind of cool too, if I can find his name. He is a full time student
who kind of just wrote this in his spare time he has a number of other Apps as
well…

Gina: Yeah, I don’t
think there are any businesses that are writing Twitter apps.

Leo: It would be
crazy. But is has Talon poll, a lot of
things that would just kill your battery. There it is Clinker Apps; it’s just a
neat story.

Gina: We are
familiar with this.

Leo: This kid’s
going somewhere. Jacob Clinker.

Gina: Circa sent
me an update about the Motorola purchase and apparently Google is going to retain
ownership of the project Arra which is the modular
Smartphone, an effort making smart phones you can snap together, so Google’s
keeping that.

Leo: Oh
interesting! Yeah I’m not surprised because that’s a very “labby”
kind of thing.

Gina: Yeah, The
division in charge of project Arra is called advanced
technology projects, headed by former (unintelligible), so Google holds on to Arra.

Leo: I really
wouldn’t want to be in that division right now, just saying… By the way, the
chat room is telling me its $1.99 it just was updated yesterday so maybe the
battery life issues are better. I will try it again. And the author is a
student at the University of Iowa, Jacob Clicker, he has written some really good, (by himself!) some really good apps, this is a kid to
watch, obviously very, very smart. It’s compatible with all versions of Android, you don’t have to have KitKat. All right, that’s it for the show! Thank
you very much! Gina Trapani is at Thinkup.com. Do you have a timeframe for a
consumer version?

Gina: Next couple
weeks, Mark’s going to be at New York Tech Meetup next Tuesday night, so we’re scrambling, but if not next week, then the week
after.

Leo: Excellent!

Gina: Yeah, I’m
excited. Thank you, another great show!

Leo: Always a pleasure!
We will see you on All about Android on Tuesdays, 5 PM
Pacific, 8 PM Eastern time. Jeff Jarvis is at the city of the University of New
York, also a fabulous writer, you can catch many of
his books at Amazon.com, all of his books, including the Fabulous Public parts,
free today only. Save a buck! Kevin marks at kevinmarks.com. Follow him on
Twitter and Google plus. Great to have you!

Kevin: Great to
be here!

Leo: We do This
Week in Google every Wednesday at 1 PM Pacific, 4 PM Eastern time,
21:00 UTC. Twit.tv, please watch live, we love it if you do, and when there’s
breaking news it’s exciting but if you can’t, don’t worry, on-demand audio and
video always available after the fact at Twit.tv/twig or wherever finer netcasts are aggregated and delivered to your device via
the interweb, like iTunes, perhaps, or Google play.
Thank you very much for joining us, we’ll see you next time on Twig!